File No. 763.72119/263
The Ambassador in Great Britain (Page) to the Secretary of State
[Received December 27, 8.15 a. m.]
5374. Your circular 24th,1 received December 25, presented this morning to Cecil in charge of Foreign Office. I again explained first sentence to him at length.
To your suggestion that the Allies’ reply to President’s note, if it be favorable, be not made public, he said that he could give no definite or official answer. This subject would have to be referred to his Government and to the Governments of her allies.
This is all that he said to me officially.
But he talked at length personally, remarking several times that he was expressing only his individual views and that I must not understand them as the views of his Government. He informed me that he was deeply hurt by the President’s note because it seemed to pass judgment on the Allied cause by putting it on the same moral level as the German cause and because one sentence (the sentence about the position of neutrals becoming intolerable) might be a veiled threat. I assured him that in my judgment no threat was intended. He was sure, too, that the British people were surprised and hurt. Since the President’s note was promptly made public and British public feeling was deeply stirred, he for his own part saw difficulties in keeping the British reply secret. The public would demand publicity. Again he reminded me that this was only his personal opinion.
Then he remarked that there is nothing that the American Government or any other human power can do which would bring the [Page 116] war to a close before the Allies had spent their utmost force to secure victory. A failure to secure a victory would leave the world at the mercy of the most arrogant and the bloodiest tyranny that had ever been organized, and that it is better to die in an effort to defeat that tyranny than to perish under its success. He had always been almost a pacifist. No man hated war more than he. No man had believed more earnestly than he that great wars were impossible. But since European civilization had been thus murderously assaulted, there was nothing to do but to defeat its desperate enemy or to perish in the effort. He had hoped that the United States understood what is at stake. He went so far as to say that if the United States should come into the war it would decide which would win-freedom or organized tyranny. If the United States should help the Germans, civilization would perish and have again to be slowly rebuilt, if it should ever appear again. If the United States should help the Allies, civilization would triumph.
My inference from this long conversation, from the comments of the Allied press, and from my reading of British public opinion, is that the answer to the President’s note will be courteous but very frank; that it will intimate or-directly declare that no efforts by any neutral government, however well meant, can help towards peace; that unless and until the Allies have spent their whole force no compromise terms will be considered; that peace will be made by those who have fought and by nobody else; and that Allied public opinion will not permit a secret reply to the President’s note. Comment here shows that the British would regard secret discussion now as a German wish and a German suggestion. Cecil, however, did not say this.
Cecil informed me that a reply to the German note would soon be ready and that a reply to the President’s note would be got ready as soon as possible. The Allies are now in consultation about it.
I regret to report that I fear no explanation can remove from the British mind the conviction that the President’s note put the two sides on the same moral level. It is this that public opinion resents. I have seen only one newspaper (the Westminster Gazette) which gave a more friendly construction; and I hear privately, but I think authoritatively, that its article was directly suggested by Asquith.